burngreave.net -- FAQ

Some information about BITPART and a roadmap to the burngreave.net site.

Burngreave.NET Projects

The burngreave.net  umbrella covers a number of different projects.

1.  Community Area Network.  We are developing a wireless based community area network in coordination with other groups in Sheffield.  For more infomation see http://bcan.burngreave.net
2. Volunteer PC support for the community at the PC Fixit  Cafe.  See http://www.burngreave.net/mailman/listinfo/cafe for more information
3. IT consultancy services / workers co-operative BITWork  
   
4. Community ISP services, hosting web sites and email for a number of organisations and bodies.
   
5. Email lists

burngreave.net -- Services

burngreave.net -- Services

There a number of services that float around burngreave.net

Who provides these services

Who provides these services


The burngreave.net services are provided by the Burngreave IT Partnership (BITPart)

Standard Letter after making account

Dear ******

Welcome to burngreave.net!

You have requested the e-mail address ******@burngreave.net.

You can access your e-mail from the following link:

https://springnight.burngreave.net/horde/

or by clicking on the e-mail link in the top rhs of the page:

http://www.burngreave.net/

username ******
password ******

We would strongly recommend you change your password **immediately** after
logging on.

You can do this by using the "password" facility on the horde section of
our website. You can find this at the bottom of the page with a padlock icon.

Taking out a burngreave.net account means you are automatically subscribed to
[users]. This is a low-volume email list run by the burngreave.net admins to
let users know of new software, new services, outages etc. Information on this
list is available at:

http://www.burngreave.net/mailman/listinfo/users

Note at http://www.burngreave.net/ there is a logon section. This is **not**
related to your email, though you are welcome to register and use the
'blogging'
and commentary facilities there.

Your burngreave.net email account comes with an associated webspace. Your
website address is:

http://www.burngreave.net/~******/

To upload webpages to your webspace, burngreave.net uses only the secure
protocols SCP and SFTP. Software tools for these protocols are readily
available.WinSCP2 [for Windows]

http://www.burngreave.net/~aland/it/microsoft/apps/WinSCP2.exe

Macintosh [Classic and OS X]

http://pro.wanadoo.fr/chombier/MacSFTP/SFTP_info.html

GNU/Linux

Many and varied, command line and gui, all free and open source, take your
pick!

You also get full shell access to the server with your account, plus
additional functions such as databases can be set up on request.

For more information see the FAQ at:

http://www.burngreave.net/node.php?id=32

If you have any other questions please ask away, we can be contacted at
.

-- AED & PT [burngreave.net admins]

Community Website

Community Website

The burngreave.net web site is based powered by Drupal and hosted in Burngreave.

Drupal is an open content management system.

This allows people to place comments on stories that are posted. You can also register with the site and use its facilities to upload files, images and post your own stories, (known as blogs).

Registered members can vote on stories, and if enough vote positively stories will be promoted to the front page.

Creating custom Drupal Themes

At the CIN Meeting recently there was a wish for some burngreave.net users to be able to create and develop their own themes or drupal. I've worked out how to do that .. and here is how it goes. in home folder create

mkdir ~/drupal/themes

copy an existing theme (to get a start)

cp -R /usr/local/htdocs/httpd/themes/aland ~/drupal/themes/mytheme_development

mv ~/drupal/themes/aland.theme ~/drupal/themes/mytheme_development

vim ~/drupal/themes/mytheme_development

and replace any instances of 'aland' with mytheme_development as root create a symlink from

ln -s /home/username/drupal/themes/mytheme_development /usr/local/htdocs/httpd/themes/mytheme_development

Now as a drupal admin log on and get the themes module and enable your new theme. Should now be able to modify the your theme and see its result on the global drupal site - without having to use root password or leave the cosy comfort of your home folder. If anybody would like to get on with this I can set it up for them just e-mail me.

File Store Module Broke Drupal .. Resolution

When administrating a node of type file .. it seems easy to break drupal .. The content from the file gets loaded into another of the node elements .. this seems to then cause apache the web server to fall over. After doing this twice now it seems to be the revision field that gets corrupted. so make sure the "Create new Revision" box is "Disabled" to prevent. The sql to fix it is

UPDATE node SET node.revisions=NULL WHERE node.nid=xxx;

where xxx is the Node id of the broken node.

Webspace, e-mail and unix shell services

Webspace, e-mail and unix shell services

In addition to the burngreave.net community web site, a rich set of services are available from burngreave.net on request.

These include

• Webspace
• • A fully featured web space with support for mysql databases, php, perl, server side includes and other open scripting languages on apache web sever
• Webmail and groupware
• • A fully featured webmail client, with calendaring and diary facilities
• Unix shell account
• • If you wish to develop your own scripts you get shell access to the web server

Creating Subfolders in IMP

You can create subfolders in IMP from the folders menu. You can the set up filters to move into folders automatically, based on things like who it was from, or sent to, or particular words in the subject or body

Unfortunatley they cannot contain other folders...

If you need to be able to create subcontainer to put other folders in like

work/project1
work/project2
personal/joe
personal/jane

You can do it like this

I just realised that you can create folders from Horde Imp that will have
subfolders by naming them like mickey/finn
 
this will create a filesystem folder and place a mailfolder inside it so you
can move your e-mail to mickey/finn ... etc 




Spam Filtering

Implemented Spam and Virus scanning on the burngreave.net mail hub. It uses http://www.spamassassin.org to filter for spam sitewide by passing all the mail through http://www.mailscanner.info and using f-prot's AV engine for Linux Both these tools are open source and give us better anti spam than many other propriety solutions and can just be used without having to purchase a high cost commercial solution. The SpamAssassin marks email it believes to be SPAM with the prefix {Spam ?} to the subject, making it easy to set up filter rules on your inbox. Mail that gets through the spam filter but is still unwanted spam can be redirected to a folder called spam-bin. Simply click on the "report as spam" link on the top imp menu. SpamAssassin will analyze this and generate new rules to try and catch future spam.

Spam-bin Screen Shot

Screen shot of Horde, showing how to redirect to spam-bin

Using other Email clients

As well as using Horde/Imp to read and send email, we support IMAPS and SMTP-AUTH to read and send email. Email client of choice is Mozilla Thunderbird- which is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux

A setup guide is available here
Setting up Thunderbird

Accessing burngreave.net services from Windows clients

To make the most of your web space and shell account you'll want to be able to upload files to it.

We don't support ftp or telnet currently as they are not really suitable for authenticated access across insecure networks.

Instead we use ssh, sftp and scp.

suitable clients for Windows are putty and WinSCP2, and if a google for them doesnt help you can get them from
http://www.burngreave.net/~aland/it/microsoft/apps

Accessing the burngreave.net services using an Apple Mac

A member of the community wrote this help for Mac users

http://www.burngreave.net/~pault/macnotes.html

Terminal Access at Abbeyfield Park House

We are developing an open access media lab.

Whilst there will be guest access, you can use your burngreave.net e-mail address and password to log on the terminals and access the resources there. Image manipulation tools, printers, scanners, and other software is available